A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
2020
Performance
Initially conceived in response to a request to create a ‘one minute sculpture’ as espoused by Erwin Wurm.
Single channel colour HD video with stereo camera sound
Cinematic screening: 2 min 41 sec
Erwin Wurm, speculated on how the restrictions of a sculpture could be overcome using everyday objects and limiting the sculpture’s life to only one minute. However, the weight of water and the length of time it took to empty the watering can were unexpected.
In this absurd action lurked conflicting, tangled, unsettling references: astrological Aquarius as a woman bearing the weight of water; the women and children who carry the world’s water; the stereotypes of purity and desire; the metaphors of forgetfulness, fecundity, of Biblical floods; the drowned women of a British Victorian imagination that haunts the site of this forest garden; the washing and watering, and our profligate expectations in the West.
Location: Forest Garden, Suffolk, UK
The Forest Garden Project is a developing concept which exists somewhere between ecological research, quiet activism, ritual, experiment and performance. A space of contradiction, slowness and listening in collaboration with the flora and fauna. In response to a search for the ‘rural idyll’ in places of increasing marginalisation, where the rural and industrial intersect and elide; where genetically engineered technologies turn fields into labs blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic. The Forest Garden Project attempts to counter this lonely place of silent disquiet which reflects a bewildered disbelief at the damage we wreak on the natural world.
performance, absurdist action, water, mythology
© Sophie Standford